CatBus

Matt_Stevens said:

*sigh* I have tried to have that one removed and replaced with my updated one, but it isn't working out. Annoying because all of those things are fixed. 

As long as those are fixed, that's fine.  I did have one question about an awkward exchange (maybe also fixed).  In the conversation between Tequila and Long on the boat, Tequila asks "Should I salute you?" twice.  Is that the real translation of the second question?

Matt_Stevens said:

Final Subtitles here...

http://www.opensubtitles.org/en/subtitles/4968714/lat-sau-san-taam-en

The ones at this link definitely had errors, although my personal copy is now so different from yours for non-error-correction reasons that I can't really provide an itemized list, sorry.  Things I remember are: lots of OCR errors where a lowercase L was confused with an I and that sort of thing (not visible when rendered in a typical sans-serif font, but still), a few missing articles here and there (get him to hospital, he joined triads in 85), equipped with one "P", matter of time spelled "metter", "happent" instead of "happen", "feeing better now", "disappoinment", and a few others I'm afraid I just don't remember.

EDIT: It's coming back to me now... Sui wasn't capitalized once, triad(s) was capitalized inconsistently (I opted for lowercase).  There was a line that went: "- A criminal./- A criminal?" and the punctuation on the two lines was reversed (question should come last).  And yeah... you have my sympathies on the subtitle editing front...

Pheran said:

I'm pretty familiar with the Star Wars SE and the various ridiculous changes it contains. In the case of Star Wars, Harmy's release is the clear choice to watch. But then I thought about TESB and realized that I'm not nearly as familiar with the SE. In fact I'm not even sure I've ever watched it. I know there are less changes than in Star Wars.

So, here's a curious question - do you feel that there are "showstopper" changes (like Greedo shooting first or the awful CGI Jabba) in the Blu-ray TESB SE that mandate watching Harmy's version? Or is it more just a preference for seeing the original theatrical version of the film?

PS: This question is not meant to detract from the amazing work Harmy is doing, it's great that he has made an original version available for us to view.

The Special Edition of ESB is the most watchable SE, if that's what you mean.  It's actually, taken as a whole, still a good movie after the alterations, unlike the others (ANH:SE is mediocre due to the trainwreck moments like the ones you mention).

That said, the theatrical is better, and there's still no necessity for the SE to even exist, and it's still being used in the Lucasfilm bait-and-switch campaign, so that's enough of a mandate for me.

CatBus said:

...while I really like the more accurate/less embellished subtitles in general, I'm just personally tied to the character names on the old subs: Alan/Tony, Foxy, etc--so I'm making a hybrid set of subs from both sources.

You'd think that would have been easy, but since there are spelling differences on some names, I ended up referring to the official English Hard Boiled movie credits as the authoritative source to resolve conflicts.  So, it's Mr. Hoi instead of Mr. Hui, and Teresa instead of Theresa.  But... it turns out the name Foxy was a Criterion invention.  The character's name in the English credits is Little Ko.  So I opted to go with the official English credits even though it's a name I'm not used to...

TheBoost said:

EEEEK! Mi suegra got my son a "Naboo Starfighter" toy for his birthday. He's been happily playing with it, until the moment I've feared for so long finally came.

"Daddy," says he, "I don't remember this in the Star Wars movie? What movie is it in?"

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My take on answering this question:

"There are a bunch of extra Star Wars stories out there that aren't part of the three real Star Wars movies.  We can go to the comics shop to see if we can find one, if you like.  I'm sure it's in one of those stories."

Later, at the comic shop.  "Ooh, lookee, Bone/Runaways/[insert age-appropriate title here]! Let's just get that!" Issue sidestepped for another day...

^ That's pretty nice, is there a high-res version?

Sorry, I should have mentioned.  I'm remuxing this because while I really like the more accurate/less embellished subtitles in general, I'm just personally tied to the character names on the old subs: Alan/Tony, Foxy, etc--so I'm making a hybrid set of subs from both sources.  So since I'm remuxing anyway, I'm also grabbing the chapter stops off the Criterion DVD and adjusting them to more-or-less the same points on this video.  No big deal, and I'm probably the only one who would care.

BD cover art though... still interested if anyone has some.

Also, does anyone have BD chapter stop timings that can be used with this?

Yes.

Also, anyone got any super-keen BD-sized Hard Boiled cover art?

msycamore said:

chyron8472 said:

Seriously, CatBus, if Star Wars is so overrated, why on earth do you bother to work on translating subtitles for such a mediocre franchise into so many languages?

Probably because he truly love Star Wars '77 and ESB '80 and kinda like ROTJ '83.

You can dislike parts of this franchise and still be a fan.

Precisely.  I love the OOT and want it preserved for posterity, globally.  The rest of the franchise could be destroyed in a warehouse fire and I'd only shed a tear for the loss of the Holiday Special.  I don't actually think it's that uncommon a set of opinions here.  Obviously you're free to think differently.

Edited to add another reason: You underestimate the power of OCD.

Lord Haseo said:

I said name 5 IMPORTANT things that happened in TMP....Read before you reply dude.

s/good/important/g

T,FTFY. I.

Lord Haseo said:

Name 5 IMPORTANT things that happened in TPM that shapes the rest of the series.....

 

The pacing in TMP was awful, it demystified the mythology of The Force, Jake Lloyd's performance was awful, every character and plot point of significance is reintroduced in AOTC so really we don't need TPM and the movie was just boring.....But its better than ROTS.......Give me a break.....

Wrong forum, but I'll keep it brief.  None of the movies had 5 good things going for them at all, so that's not a good metric for distinguishing them.  TPM was annoying enough to keep me awake and left a deep enough impression that I can remember parts of it.  That's a pretty low bar, but ROTS failed to clear it.  AOTC cleared the annoying hurdle*, placing it in the middle of the pack.  Not only do I feel ROTS is the worst prequel (much more boring and forgettable than the rest), I've found that many here agree.  Just because so many share my opinion doesn't mean yours is invalid though.

* AOTC was more annoying than TPM, but that doesn't really work in its favor.  I actually had to walk out of the theatre for a few minutes during AOTC, while wincing seemed adequate to stomach TPM.  I don't disagree with any of your TPM criticisms.

Lord Haseo said:

I really don't care how much of an OT fanboy you are you've have to admit that ROTS isn't anywhere near bad.

I don't have to admit anything of the sort.  TPM was easily the best prequel, ROTS was easily the worst, and they were all terrible.  Opinions vary, go figure.

The worst thing about Star Wars being so very, very overrated? The worst thing about the monolithic presence of this franchise, whose each entry devalues the whole? There’s one truly magnificent movie and one very good movie that are being swallowed up by cancerous growth of the larger entity. They’re two flowers, choked out in a lot full of weeds. And there’s some guy named JJ Abrams bringing in a backhoe and a whole bunch of new weeds. 

This statement has some truth in it, but it doesn't go nearly far enough because it completely sidesteps the impact of the rampant revisionism in the Star Wars filmography.

If you look at the complete saga as it exists in 2011 with all revisions, you're down to one good movie (ESB:SE), one middling movie (ANH:SE), and crap.  The "flowers" he thinks are still in the garden are just dandelions like the rest at this point.

Ditto here, I don't recall ever seeing anything like that in any version I saw, but I could certainly be wrong if it was fleeting enough.

Lord Haseo said:

...the PT fell short...

Depends on what yardstick you use.  As a cynical cash-in, it didn't fall short at all.  It made money, so it was a big success in that sense.  As an artistic endeavor, well, it was a trainwreck.  It's certainly not a work of art in the sense of the term that has any positive connotations.

Calling the SW saga anything but art is insulting.

I can live with that.

AntcuFaalb said:

They're supposed to be entertaining like the Flash Gordon serials of yesteryear, nothing more.

And Raiders of the Lost Ark was supposed to be entertaining like some other silly serials of yesteryear.  But, IMO, something funny happened on the way to the final cut.  These movies, perhaps entirely by chance, all became better than the serials they emulated.  I don't disagree that the Star Wars trilogy is ultimately space opera and not some of the world's 50 most important films (But 50 most influential? Probably), but they are a damn sight better than Flash Gordon.  The term "better than the sum of its parts" I think applies fairly here.

The thing for me is that I can't separate the final product from the craft and effort that went into it.  If I can tell that a creators were just going through the motions and taking shortcuts, I can't help but enjoy the final product less, even if that product is not markedly different than that produced by creators who clearly worked their asses off.

But as I've said before, ultimately I enjoy the whole trilogy, even though none of them are in my personal top ten.  But I don't like ROTJ as well as SW or ESB.  And I don't like any Star Wars film as well as The Third Man (I think Kane is overrated...).  But I enjoy all of them in their own ways, to different degrees.

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

Lord Haseo said:

And until ROTJ:R comes out I have to be constantly reminded of the gaping plot hole concerning Leia's true mother.

What plot hole is that?

I assume he's talking about the plot hole in ROTS (not ROTJ) where Padme dies before Leia could have had memories of her.  Continuity with the existing films wasn't given a lot of consideration in the PT.  Obviously this plothole could have been avoided by having Padme live for a few more years after giving birth.  But I'm not sure how Adywan could swing that sort of change.

EDIT: I guess he could be saying that this bit in ROTJ could be edited out in ROTJ:R to effectively remove the plothole from ROTS if you're watching them as a complete saga.  But editing one movie as a way to fix continuity problems in another movie seems a little backward to me.

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

Come to think of it, Luke's plan for rescuing Han at the beginning of ROTJ is about on par with George's strategies for improving the OT.

The difference is that Luke's plan worked.

Contentious or incomplete, but contentious is admittedly more fun.  Welcome aboard!

Hey, it's me. said:

Are you all that opinionated and arrogant? 

I can't speak for the others, but I certainly am. ;)

I didn't respond to your posts because I didn't disagree with anything you said, and I didn't feel anything you said required further elaboration from me.  So basically you're just going to have to be wronger and/or vaguer if you're fishing for responses.  Sorry, those are the breaks.

msycamore said:

I still to this day cannot understand how some found ROTJ to be a satisfying sequel and at the same time attacked Phantom Menace.

If it helps...

I don't find ROTJ to be entirely satisfying, so maybe I don't love it enough to be qualified to answer this, but...

ROTJ dealt with characters that I already knew and loved.  Maybe they weren't at their best in this film, but they were present and I cared about what happened to them.  TPM dealt with characters that I didn't care to know (even though some of them were purportedly the same people as in the OT, the resemblance was superficial at best).  Story-wise, ROTJ took the existing storyline that I loved and brought it to a close.  TPM tried to create a new storyline that I never wished to see before, and having seen it, confirmed that I was right.  On that scale, part of the love of ROTJ is sentimental bleed-over from the other films, I admit it.

But there were also good performances in ROTJ.  Hamill and McDiarmid, for example.  There wasn't a single good performance in TPM.  Not one.  Not only that, but the "bad" performances in ROTJ eclipsed the best performances from TPM.  At least Ford and Fisher managed to make eye contact with one another when talking, if not much else.

The environments and such, models, sets, etc, in ROTJ, weren't as well integrated, or honestly even necessary in many cases, into the film as they were in the other films.  But they were never the sterile, boring dreck from TPM.  I'd rather have indulgent than dull.  And sometimes over-the-top just plain worked: case in point, the Emperor's arrival with an obvious Riefenstahl rip-off just plain worked.  The space battle, yes, not as gripping as the asteroid chase in ESB, but just compare that to the dreadful pod race--I rest my case.

The score for ROTJ is pretty solid too (again, I don't like it quite as well, but I like it).  I certainly owe part of my love of Star Wars to John Williams.  Again, TPM showed that John Williams could produce uninteresting dreck as well.

That said, there are bits of ROTJ that plumb the depths that we saw later with TPM.  The humor is certainly one thing: the droid torture, the burps, the slapstick, the tongue-in-cheek but dumb classic adventure tropes (Chewie does a Tarzan yell?  Lord).  I can make no excuses here.

ROTJ was a disappointment in many ways.  But there were some good things about it and I enjoy watching it from time to time.  I thought TPM was pretty much a trainwreck of everything bad that could possibly be put into a film--that is, until I saw AOTC and ROTS and saw it could get even worse.  I can certainly say that there are enough differences between ROTJ and TPM that I can like one and despise the other.  But ultimately it's all subjective.

There is at least one change from 2.1 to 2.5 that I know of, probably more.

I have to say that I agree in essence with everything Bingowings just wrote, yet still personally enjoy ROTJ.  Not as much as the other two, but I still enjoy it.  What I like is: the score (not my favorite, but still strong), the sets/models/environments, strong performances from... some of the cast, and it closes the story started by the other films in a somewhat satisfying way.  But yeah, the script is thin, the Lucas-cutesy-humor is off-putting, and certain cast members just phoned in their performances.  But it is still undeniably a Star Wars film, something that I can't really honestly say about the prequels.

On second thought, I'm ditching the world domination map entirely.  It was useful back when there were more areas without coverage, but now a simple list of languages is a far more useful and accurate way of describing coverage.  There is still an update pending.